Of Kings and Prophets

Normally on Mondays, I share a little devotional thought or two. Except for the past few months, which were filled with my rambling posts about gnosticism. I fully intended to get back to devotional stuff for today.

But then, this past weekend, I got caught up on my TV shows and I watched the premiere for Of Kings and Prophets, ABC’s attempt at dramatizing the conflict between Saul and David.

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has been done. A few years ago, NBC tried this when they set the whole drama in modern times with Kings, a show that didn’t make it past one season. So how did ABC do?

In my not-so-humble opinion, surprisingly well. I thought it was a pretty decent attempt, hitting on notes that often get overlooked (i.e. the fact that Israel was a fractured tribal league at the beginning of Saul’s reign). There were some interesting licenses taken with the story. For example, the writers decided to say that Judah was acting as arms dealers for the Philistines, which struck me as kind of odd.

I have to admit, though, that I wasn’t all that impressed with the guy playing David. I did like how they did some foreshadowing by having David lounging in Saul’s throne at the end of the episode, but otherwise he kind of struck me as meh.

So should you watch it? Maybe. Maybe not. I suspect that the folks at ABC wanted to do a Game of Thrones sort of thing with a Bible story. Let’s face it, they picked the right one with David. There are some things that happened in the episode that raised my eyebrows a little. And it is pretty violent. But this is a network TV show, so they don’t go full HBO or anything.

I’ll be watching, if for no other reason to see how close they stick to the Biblical narrative.